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Operations and Management: A Small Fry’s Solution

For Chicago-based food cataloger Lobster Gram, “abandoned calls were a huge problem,” says founder Dan Zawacki. And no wonder: Lobster Gram’s outdated phone system didn’t have the capability to put callers into a queue, Zawacki admits. So incoming calls — and potential orders — would go unanswered if all the phone reps were busy, and customers would just get annoyed and hang up.

The cataloger in February 2002 spent $40,000 on a new phone system from Avaya, which lets customers know they’ve called Lobster Gram and that a customer service rep will be with them shortly. Many catalogers might take such basic technology for granted, but for Lobster Gram, it’s a whole new world. The less than $5 million company’s call abandonment rates — which used to hover around 4% before the new phone system was installed — have dropped below 2%, Zawacki says.

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Being prepared for the holiday rush used to mean stocking shelves and making sure your associates were ready for the long hours. But the digital revolution has changed everything, most importantly, customer expectations. Retailers with a physical store presence should be asking themselves—what am I doing to wow the customer?